Summer TV season brings more unreal reality

By Daniel B. Kline

My new reality show, "Skeet Shooting with Celebrities" stars Fabio, Coolio, Charo, Jacko, the person who played C3PO, Jeb Bush, a woman who once met Tom Cruise and Spuds McKenzie. We tried to get Herb, the guy who had never tried a Whopper, but his people declined because he has a holding deal with VH1 for "Flavor of Grease" a dating show where women who like Whoppers try to sleep with him.

Answering the long-asked question, "can minor celebrities shoot skeet?" my show includes every reality TV staple. We'll have drunken hookups, weird angry diatribes and alliances so meaningless and confusing that nobody even remembers who has double-crossed who.

We also plan on guest appearances by Gary Busey, Screech and Flavor Flav. We didn't actually invite Flav, but he lives in a dumpster behind the studio we shot the show in so we let him come on, sleep with one of the contestants and say his name a lot.

In addition to testing the participants proficiency at skeet shooting, we also plan to weigh them, make them sing schmaltzy songs and force them to make drunken phone calls to former significant others. We're also thinking about making them ballroom dance and might send them for a weekend in New Orleans with Verne Troyer and Danny Bonaduce.

As you'd almost have to guess, we will be forcing all the contestants to live in a house together where the pantry will be empty, but the liquor cabinet stocked. Consisting almost entirely of a hot tub and one of those giant glass showers that only exist in Las Vegas hotel rooms and reality show living quarters, the house will have a giant circular bed for everyone to share.

Airing on CWPBS (the network launched when PBS, after a failed pledge drive, merged with The CW), the show airs six night a week with regular episodes. Each week there's also a three-hour Thursday night results show consisting entirely of a really long drum roll and sad shots of the person getting sent home.

Along with 32 minutes of commercial time every hour, the show will feature enough product placement shots to put NASCAR to shame. The skeet shooting scenes take place at R.C. Cola/Imodium AD/Arby's field and during the show, the host will be required to mention a sponsor at least every fourth word.

As for a host, we're deciding between Bruce Buffer, Frank Stallone, Dedee Pfeiffer, Haylie Duff and the Wilson brother who isn't Owen or Luke. We'll also have celebrity judges with evil North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il in the Simon Cowell role of saying mean things whether they are deserved or not.

If the show catches on with the viewing public we hope for the second edition to be on the fall schedule where it will replace all other programming on the network. After that we'll be licensing versions of the series all over the world including a Spanish-language version "Skeet Que Tira Con Celebridades Gigante," which like all shows on Univision or Telemundo will consist mostly of busty women in bikinis jumping.

Daniel B. Kline's new book, "Easy Answers to Every Problem" comes out in September. He can be reached at dan@notastep.com.